My Boarding School Blog

Like other graduation ceremonies, there were caps and gowns, emotional parents and applause from the audience.

All such ceremonies are poignant, but this one stood out.

Two high school seniors with severe autism received certificates to mark the completion of their 12th year of school Thursday. They attend an alternative program called Step-Up, at the Stepping Stones Center in Indian Hill. The program for autistic teens is the only one of its kind in Greater Cincinnati.
Frank Tolliver couldn’t stop smiling as he held his certificate and posed for photos. Eric Cain was more reserved and probably wondered if people would ever stop snapping pictures.

“It’s good!” Frank said of his moment in the spotlight. He wore his mother’s cap and gown.

“I am so proud of him,” said his mother, Sandra Tolliver. “We are looking for nothing but good things from him.”

Eric’s mom, Dorothy Payne, was proud, too: “I’m not a crier, but I might cry later.”

It was the first such ceremony for the Step-Up program, which is about 4 years old. Technically, it wasn’t a graduation but a completion ceremony. The two will continue at Stepping Stones because school districts are obligated to educate special needs students until age 22.

Those in the Step-Up program for teens have classic autism, which is the most severe form. Among their characteristics: hypersensitivity to their environment, including noises, touches and other stimuli; non-verbal; aggressive or violent behavior.

Those who run the Step-Up program see progress in all eight students currently enrolled.

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — A fight at a troubled South Los Angeles high school escalated into a campuswide brawl involving as many as 600 students before it was quelled by police officers in riot gear.

The melee, which students said was between rival black and Hispanic gangs and started around noon on Friday, forced the authorities to shut down the school, Locke High, and keep students in their classrooms. After restoring order, they rounded up those involved and separated them, holding Hispanic students in the gymnasium and black students in another room.

Four people were arrested, three students for fighting and one nonstudent on suspicion of possessing a knife, said Susan Cox, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles school district.

Several students were injured and treated at the scene, officials said.

A music teacher, Reggie Smith, told The Los Angeles Times that it was a chaotic scene and difficult to distinguish between those fighting and those trying to avoid the mayhem.

“The kids were crazy, running from place to place, jumping on other kids,” Mr. Smith said. “Some of my kids were crying because they were walking to class with friends and they got jumped.”

Victor Wong, an 18-year-old senior, told The Times that the brawl grew out of a fight two days earlier between two graffiti gangs. He said Hispanic students who were friends of his asked him to participate in a fight planned for Friday that was to pit 10 Hispanic students against 10 black students.

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We Have Charts and Graphs. The data is unequivocal: in 1998-1999, 24,000 new teachers have entered teaching through alternative certification routes; in total, nationwide, since about 1985, about 125,000 individuals have been added alternatively. Unlike graduates of traditional routes, these individuals share characteristics that make them a superior choice to teach all children, especially children at risk. They already have degrees, are more likely to have work experience outside professional education; they tend to be older than traditional graduates, they are more likely to be people of color and more are likely to be male. This research is not new; findings like these have held consistent for the last fifteen years and can be verified in scholarly journals and refereed articles from many sources.

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If you reviewed Dalton Sargent’s report cards, you’d know only half his story. The 15-year-old Altadena junior has lousy grades in many subjects. He has blown off assignments and been dissatisfied with many of his teachers. It would be accurate to call him a problematic student. But he is also gifted.

Dalton is among the sizable number of highly intelligent or talented children in the nation’s classrooms who find little in the standard curriculum to rouse their interest and who often fall by the wayside.

With schools under intense pressure from state and federal mandates such as No Child Left Behind to raise test scores of low-achieving pupils, the educational needs of gifted students — who usually perform well on standardized tests — too often are ignored, advocates say.

Nationally, about 3 million kindergarten through 12th-grade students are identified as gifted, but 80% of them do not receive specialized instruction, experts say. Studies have found that 5% to 20% of students who drop out are gifted.

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